Saturday, January 5, 2013

Fallen Bwarth #1 (A M.M.O.BW.P.G. - Fallen Earth Game Review)

Welcome to Fallen Earth, a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game that BW heartily endorses. It's also completely free to play (I play through Steam), which is exactly the right price for BW to endorse.Now let it be known that I have a soft spot for post-apocalyptic themes to begin with, though I often find them ultimately shallow and narrow in scope. Not so with FE. I'm not a big MMO player and this was the second one I ever tried (after Dungeons and Dragons Online, which just didn't do it for me) and every other one I've tested since has left me unfulfilled. I've mentioned before that not everyone who plays a Star Wars game wants to be a Jedi - not everyone in the future wastelands wants to kill people either. Ol' BW likes to make tee-shirts, for instance. In FE this means harvesting some cotton plants, and maybe some other raw materials (depending on how advanced a tee you're aiming for), and have a seat while you wait a few minutes for it to be done. That's it, and there's skills to make food items, weapons, ammunition, armor, vehicles... pretty much everything in the game can be crafted (except the special unique people-that-pay-to-play things).Being free-to-play usually means being limited too, but in FE it simply means waiting longer. You can only have one character at a time and you can only craft one item at a time, without making any lists of things to automatically craft while you're offline. I don't think it's very expensive to upgrade this but one cultivates patience in the Bwogosphere by engaging in such exercises. I made my first character (...because of course I've made more than one, we've covered this already) and spent about thirty hours learning the ropes and recipes to be a successful contributor to life in the dystopian utopia by way of providing decent clothes and armor (did I mention you can make dye to change the colors of things too?). The big selling point for most players is, naturally, crafting their own vehicle (not horses... you have to just buy those) - and there's plenty of work to put in before you see any results. You're talking weeks of real-time before you have a nice car so most folks stick to the ATV, which is actually part of the main-ish quest. It involves finding/buying parts, crafting parts, combining those parts into other parts, and so on. Nothing compares to the first time I saw a purple corvette with yellow highlights pull up into Starterville though - the cred from driving one of those demands attention.The community is pretty helpful and the chat has many different filters/channels (help, auction, and local, to name a few), so rookies will be just fine as long as they don't abuse the chat. That gets you kicked for sure, as there's almost always and Admin around. The game is very forgiving though, and if your the type that just wants to go it alone without any buddies that's cool too. You'll want to stay stocked up on ammo and health if you start to wander into territory that has baddies way above your level... but maybe that's a lesson best learned firsthand.A piece of advice: Avoid blood rabbits at all costs. You think you can take them. You can't.With Brightest of (Lonely Tumbleweed) Greens,BW